It's Saturday. Which of course means this stalker is once again engaging in what seems to has become his regular weekend ritual of shouting his increasingly unhinged conspiracy theory at people and @-ing me while doing so, so I'm presented their responses.
I frankly do not have the time nor energy right now to properly go through and point out the most horrific lies in today's batch, but between having this in my mentions and my feed still full of people talking about how people are terrorizing a trans cartoonist, I'd like to talk a little bit here about the sort of crap marginalized people have to deal with from reactionary thugs like these that doesn't seem to click for people who aren't constantly targeted by these campaigns... and for that matter, plenty of people who are regularly targeted by them.
Let's say, for argument's sake, you're a cis straight yadda yadda white guy, and I ask you to imagine what someone would have to do in order to make people believe you're guilty of a crime.
You, hypothetical construct I'm addressing in the third person, would probably imagine a very elaborate set up, where someone would have to go out and actually commit a crime, and falsify some evidence that points at you. Or barring that, the person trying to frame you is like, testifying in court against you, lying through their teeth, explaining some scenario where you did something horrible to them where there conveniently is no physical evidence needed for things to stick.
And assuming you are a person of much renown, like a celebrity or a politician or something, that might even be true. Maybe you get your PR people out there to demand a formal investigation or something. But the thing is, the farther you get from being world-renowned Senator/Actor C.H. Whiteman there, the less likely anyone is to care enough to look into whether any claims being made about you are actually true.
Like just as a basic litmus test of this here, remember Little Shop of Horrors? If I told you that the lead actor, the guy playing Seymour, quit acting in the mid-90s because his wife died and he had to go take care of his kids, would you believe me without checking?
OK, now if I said the woman who played Audrey in the same movie quit acting to be a single mother under the same conditions?
And what if I said the same thing about the voice actor for Audrey 2, the big killer plant?
Also, without looking at IMDB, whose names can you recall out of those three, and what else can you think of that they were in?
OK, so pencils down now. The first character on that list was played by Rick Moranis, who you can probably instantly recall from a bunch of other movies, even where he played minor characters, like guy-who-gets-possessed-by-a-hellhound, and that is, in fact, the actual reason you haven't seen him in anything for the past couple decades (although his kids are adults now and he's looking into a comeback). And this weird personal fact about his life is something I didn't even need to look up, it's a point of well-known trivia.
Meanwhile Audrey was played by Ellen Greene, a name I'm betting you did not know, belonging to an actress who is still getting steady work, has never spent a year not filming something, and has played some 52 other characters you can't name a single one of and Audrey 2 was played by Levi Stubbs, who himself died of cancer around when Moranis retired, and I find most people my age know little enough about him beyond that role that you'll likely be surprised by me posting this youtube video and saying "same guy by the way."THE FOUR TOPS - I CAN'T HELP MYSELF (SUGAR PIE, HONEY BUNCH) LIVE PARIS FRANCE 1967. GROUP MEMBERS ARE: LEVI STUBBS, ABDUL 'DUKE' FAKIR, RENALDO 'OBIE' BENSO...... and further strengthening the point there, not too far down search results for "Little Shop of Horrors singer" you can also find more fun facts about Rick Moranis' post-acting career mixed in with the Levi Stubbs stuff.
Point is, everyone's more invested in the white guy's narrative here.
And the larger point I was making is, because of that, if you want to accuse someone of a crime, the more marginalized they are, the less work is really needed for it to stick. You don't have to actually frame someone for a particular murder/theft/arson whatever, you can just kind of claim them to have been responsible for a crime that never actually happened to begin with, confident that no one will bother looking into it.
And when we're really dealing with people on the margins of society, like, oh, random trans people, the level of general apathy on really looking into things gets to this really surreal place where not only do people stop asking "did the accused really do the thing?" and "did the thing even actually happen?" but even the question of "is the thing even actually any sort of crime/wrongdoing?"
The one version of this to really exist in the public consciousness that I can think of is the whole "driving while black" concept where police will stop certain people randomly on suspicions that they're driving stolen cars or whatever, which outside of this sort of profiling is just... not a thing! We do not have a social convention where it's accepted that police just randomly stop people to see if they're driving heir own car or someone else's. If you're in a white enough area, the very concept probably totally foreign to you and sounds like some real Dystopian Police State sort of thing. As it should. But for some people, the total non-crime of driving your own car is Suspicious Behavior.
There's a lot of this sort of thing. The big well-publicized witch hunt of the day is attacking the creator of this comic here (which I'd normally RT the original creator's posting of, but she does not need this crap today). The "crime" for which this is being cited as evidence is that this comic is like, propaganda encouraging people to shoplift. And again, that just simply Is Not A Thing. We do not, as a society, have any sort of standing agreement that creating media where shoplifting is depicted constitutes the promotion of shoplifting as a concept. The promotion of shoplifting as a concept is also not an actual crime in the first place. And further, if these previous facts weren't true
(Twitter is being really weird and disappearing part of this thread-in-progress to the phantom zone, so excuse me while I try to fix it)
we would have this HUGE backlog of several thousand movies, TV shows, books, songs, and stage plays whose creators we need to pillory first. Not to mention all those accomplices acting in these, producing them, filming them, airing them, before we got around to some web comic.
Twitter seems to be having really serious server issues today.
Plus seriously, even the most Orwellian of speculative fiction never gets to the point where just acknowledging a crime exists as a concept is enough to call down a crackdown.
As a more direct example of this, I seem to recall an incident a few months back where Puritan Fascist Vigilantes were calling for the head of the queer creators of some indie unlicensed Neon Genesis Evangellion game for alluding to problematic aspects of the source material, while rather conspicuously taking no issue at all with said source for outright depicting those aspects.
Other weird crimes I've seen invented, off the top of my head, purely so authoritarian thugs can pretend to have a pretense for violence against queer people include:
- Portraying fictional couples with power imbalances!
- Confronting special above-the-law people with grievances!
And of course the baffling angle taken by this weird stalker who hasn't shut up about me for months:
- Uh... failing to read the future and learn someone will one day be a bigot, sleeping with some guy once then later not sleeping with him causing him to become a bigot? I think?
And again, if you're someone the general public and law enforcement bodies have enough interest in to never have faced this, you'd think the people being accused of these sorts of invented on the spot "crimes" would at least be consistently "guilty" of those but again, we are way beyond the periphery of where anyone shows any skepticality over these claims. Accusations being grounded in reality is potentially a bonus, but the real goal is just to make sure whatever BS the accuser is shouting feels scandalous and damning within a local context. If everyone in the room is super passionate about turnips, saying "you know, Cynthia hates turnips" has the potential to do way more damage than saying "you know, Cynthia once killed a guy," because you never know who has a weirdly weirdly open mindset on murder, but you're positive this crowd you're trying to turn can't stand turnip haters. Plus hey, if you're really accusing someone of murder, you should really be talking to the police, but this IS the correct venue for one to air their turnip-related dirty laundry. Zero legal stakes but local shunning is ideal
Meanwhile with my stalker here, plan A, based in the assumption that I am off EVERYONE'S radar was to go with a trans-twitter specific attack (the incoherent Linehan crap), but that backfired horribly since it turns out that while I AM a complete nobody, if we're focusing just on the weird little niche of people for whom "Graham Linehan is an absolute bigoted monster making everyone's lives as miserable as possible" is a common foundation, there's too damn many people who know who I am/how weirdly fixated on me, specifically Graham is for that one to fly.
So plan B seems to be to treat me as X degree more of a real person people care enough about to question things to upgrade me to the "real crime, fictitious example of it" tier.
And of course, even being able to attempt to defame me with one ridiculous lie, then shake it off and try another ridiculous lie the next freaking day is something it's only possible to even try and pull when targeting someone so marginalized that nothing really sticks in anyone's memory, even something absurdly recent like that.
So yeah. That's all part of how bigotry works.